Weird Science is immune to the threat of the Super Bowl

The curse of the Super Bowl:Strikes pretty much anybody in the same city. You might think that males are more likely to be die-hard football fans, and thus more susceptible to a physical response to a loss by the home team, but a study of general mortality in the days following a Super Bowl loss shows that isn't so. The increased mortality that occurs after a loss struck the elderly preferentially, but that's about it. They also saw the largest protective effects when the home team won, as did—surprise—women. So, if your mom, wife, or girlfriend says she's not interested in the game, you should tell her to root for the home team for her own health.

Forget competing with food, now they're talking about competing with tequila: Although corn-based ethanol hasn't worked out well as a biofuel, there are plenty of other plants that might do better. The latest one to capture the attention of some researchers: the agave, better known as a key ingredient in tequila. There's an entire issue of a journal devoted to pondering whether different species of agave might make good biofuel raw materials. When it comes to Agave tequilana, however, the answer seems to be a definite no. If we try to use the bits of the plants that don't go into booze, then the economics of it work out to be significantly worse than corn-based ethanol.

The curse of the Oscar:Only strikes females. If they get a best actress or supporting actress award, they're more likely to end up divorced than the men who take home a best actor or supporting-actor trophy. A big portion of that difference comes from major dips in marriage survival right after the win and about three years later. The researchers ascribe it to men not being comfortable with wives who are highly successful.

Getting bartenders to stop doing armchair psychiatry: And enlist them to helping with the real thing. Military veterans face a host of potential issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder, but identifying those at risk and getting them to enroll in programs intended to help them can be a challenge. So, a few researchers surveyed bartenders at Veterans of Foreign Wars establishments, to find out if they thought they could help out. "Bartenders reported close, family-like relationships with the veterans and indicated that veterans shared their problems quite often," they found. Further, the mixologists were willing to take some basic training in recognizing signs of serious problems, and refer those people to professional services.

Viruses wake up and smell the coffee: Lentiviruses, which include HIV, aren't all sinister. Their properties make them great for inserting genes into the chromosomes of other organisms, either for genetic experiments in mice, or gene therapy in humans. However, getting high-concentrations of a virus, sufficient to infect a lot of cells, can be tough. Fortunately, a team from UT-Southwestern is on the case. "Here we present a simple and inexpensive method to increase the titer [viral concentrations] by 3- to 8-fold for both integration-competent lentivirus and integration-deficient lentivirus," they've announced. "This is achieved during standard lentiviral production by the addition of caffeine to a final concentration of 2-4mM." That's much less concentrated than coffee, apparently.

As if the traffic weren't a threat on its own: Road traffic noise is actually a risk factor for strokes. Researchers had a population of over 57,000, including 1,881 stroke victims to work with, and used address information to estimate traffic noise. Every 10 decibels increased the incident risk ratio by 1.14.

Politics is for the bored: But then again, athletics may be as well. "A series of studies examined whether political participation can emerge from general patterns of indiscriminate activity," say the authors, using measures of activity that include impulsiveness, pace of life, and physical activity. These measures correlated with various forms of civil activity, including voting.